The Donald gets behind the front-runner in Las Vegas, but with no four-letter words or talk of birth certificates -- alas.

LAS VEGAS -- The last time Donald Trump gave a political speech here, he explained to a devastated crowd why he could not possibly attain the presidency.

"There's a real good chance, no matter what happens, I won't win," he said, "because, you know, one of these blood-sucking politicians who's been bullshitting people for years will end up, you know, getting elected."

Trump boasted about getting President Obama to release his birth certificate -- "I accomplished something that nobody else had accomplished." He lamented high oil prices: "We have nobody in Washington that sits back and says, 'You're not going to raise that fucking price, you understand that?'"

Perhaps that was the mental picture a more subdued Trump had in mind on Thursday, when he endorsed Mitt Romney.

"Mitt is tough, he's smart, he's sharp," the reality-show star and New York real-estate mogul said, speaking before a backdrop of American flags in the lobby of his eponymous hotel tower off the Las Vegas Strip. "He is not going to allow bad things to continue to happen to this country that we all love."

Romney next took the podium, emblazoned with a plaque reading "TRUMP," with a slightly sheepish smile. "There are some things that you can't imagine happening in your life," he said. "Uh, this is one of them."

Romney added, "Being in Donald Trump's magnificent hotel and having his endorsement is a delight."

Trump, Romney said, "has shown an extraordinary ability to understand how the economy works and create jobs for the American people." He praised Trump's tough talk on China -- "we need to have a president who stands up to cheaters," he said.

He did not, alas, echo Trump's earlier words for Chinese leadership, which were, "Listen, you motherfuckers, we're going to tax you 25 percent."

The earlier speech came last April, when, as you will recall, Trump was riding a wave of irresistible publicity for his shameless flogging of the birth-certificate issue and his contemplation, which he and his advisers insisted was totally serious, of a Republican presidential candidacy.

In the months since announcing he wouldn't seek the nomination, Trump has continued to dip a toe into the political arena, whether hinting at an independent bid or attempting to host a GOP debate in Iowa -- an effort that fell apart when Romney and most of the other candidates refused to attend. Newt Gingrich, whom Trump snubbed with his endorsement, had said he would attend.

Trump's building, dubbed the Trump International Tower, rises phalically behind the Strip, set back closer to the strip clubs on Industrial Road than the pedestrian traffic of Las Vegas Boulevard. It does not include a casino, and though Trump likes to claim that the 64-story, 24-karat-gold-plated tower is the city's tallest building, the needle-shaped Stratosphere Hotel is far taller. (Trump does not consider it a building.) The lobby is a soothing mix of glittering crystal, bronze satin and peach-colored marble. It is, you know, classy.

In the gift shop, the Trump Store, T-shirts and hats bearing the words "You're Fired!" are for sale, as are copies of nine different books by Trump, "gold bars" made of chocolate ($4) and Trump's own signature blend of tea in both regular and decaf.

It was this flamboyance that had the giant horde of media that gathered here hoping that some sort of crazy spectacle would unfold. But Trump spoke onstage for only about a minute and kept his remarks tame and acceptable.

Still, Trump couldn't resist giving about three impromptu press conferences on his way in and out of the venue, but even there, he was measured and on message. Asked what constituency he might bring to support Romney, Trump said, "I think people that are tired of watching this nation get ripped off, and that's a lot of people."

He added, "I bring a lot of people with me. If you look at my Twitter, if you look at my anything -- if you look at my ratings, period -- we bring a lot of people. Not because people like me, but they agree with what I'm saying about our country. We are being just ripped, to the tune of trillions of dollars, by other countries andd other places, whether it's China or OPEC or India. And I don't think that's going to happen with Mitt Romney."

Asked what happened with Gingrich, who was rumored to be getting the endorsement until the Romney news contradicted that late Wednesday, Trump said, "He's a friend of mine, I like him a lot, I respect him a lot. But this is the way I went."

Democrats would like the Trump news to embarrass Romney, and have taken hte occasion to give new life to Romney's recent "I like being able to fire people" gaffe. But while Romney and Trump both have excellent hair and are both very rich -- Romney joked Thursday about being "not as successful" as Trump -- it's safe to say no one is going to mistake them for one another anytime soon. Despite their shared tax bracket, Trump appeals to precisely the opposite strain of the GOP from Romney -- the vulgar, unrefined, proudly backwards strain.

Up to now, that strain has belonged to Gingrich, with his tone of striving resentment and his refusal to play by polite rules. As Gingrich's campaign has fallen apart (again) in recent weeks, the appeal of an ever-unfolding spectacle was all he still had going for him. Now, Romney has taken that away from him. He has snatched away the absurdity card.

And in the process, he has tamed Trump, at least for the moment. Hoping against hope, reporters asked Trump if there was a chance he could still run as a third-party candidate.

"I think what is going to happen is Mitt Romney is going to get the nomination," Trump said, "and, obviously, then I wouldn't do anything."

And with that, the man whose antics make American politics seem dignified by comparison was gone.

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Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

Sending these notices is WeCroak’s sole function. They arrive “at random times and at any moment just like death,” according to the app’s website, and are accompanied by a quote meant to encourage “contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation.” Though the quotes are not intended to induce nausea and despair, this is sometimes their effect. I’m eating lunch with my husband one afternoon when WeCroak presents a line from the Zen poet Gary Snyder: “The other side of the ‘sacred’ is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”

The president is the common thread between the recent Republican losses in Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Roy Moore was a uniquely flawed and vulnerable candidate. But what should worry Republicans most about his loss to Democrat Doug Jones in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate race in Alabama was how closely the result tracked with the GOP’s big defeats last month in New Jersey and Virginia—not to mention how it followed the pattern of public reaction to Donald Trump’s perpetually tumultuous presidency.

Jones beat Moore with a strong turnout and a crushing lead among African Americans, a decisive advantage among younger voters, and major gains among college-educated and suburban whites, especially women. That allowed Jones to overcome big margins for Moore among the key elements of Trump’s coalition: older, blue-collar, evangelical, and nonurban white voters.

Russia's strongman president has many Americans convinced of his manipulative genius. He's really just a gambler who won big.

I. The Hack

The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them.

Clustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them.

Brushing aside attacks from Democrats, GOP negotiators agree on a late change in the tax bill that would reduce the top individual income rate even more than originally planned.

For weeks, Republicans have brushed aside the critique—brought by Democrats and backed up by congressional scorekeepers and independent analysts—that their tax plan is a bigger boon to the rich than a gift to the middle class.

On Wednesday, GOP lawmakers demonstrated their confidence as clearly as they could, by giving a deeper tax cut to the nation’s top earners.

A tentative agreement struck by House and Senate negotiators would reduce the highest marginal tax rate to 37 percent from 39.6 percent, in what appears to be the most significant change to the bills passed by each chamber in the last month. The proposal final tax bill would also reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, rather than the 20 percent called for in the initial House and Senate proposals, according to a Republican aide privy to the private talks.

If Democratic candidate Doug Jones had lost to GOP candidate Roy Moore, weakened as he was by a sea of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, then some of the blame would have seemed likely to be placed on black turnout.

But Jones won, according to the Associated Press, and that script has been flipped on its head. Election Day defied the narrative and challenged traditional thinking about racial turnout in off-year and special elections. Precincts in the state’s Black Belt, the swathe of dark, fertile soil where the African American population is concentrated, long lines were reported throughout the day, and as the night waned and red counties dominated by rural white voters continued to report disappointing results for Moore, votes surged in from urban areas and the Black Belt. By all accounts, black turnout exceeded expectations, perhaps even passing previous off-year results. Energy was not a problem.

There’s a fiction at the heart of the debate over entitlements: The carefully cultivated impression that beneficiaries are simply receiving back their “own” money.

One day in 1984, Kurt Vonnegut called.

I was ditching my law school classes to work on the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate against Ronald Reagan, when one of those formerly-ubiquitous pink telephone messages was delivered to me saying that Vonnegut had called, asking to speak to one of Mondale’s speechwriters.

All sorts of people called to talk to the speechwriters with all sorts of whacky suggestions; this certainly had to be the most interesting. I stared at the 212 phone number on the pink slip, picked up a phone, and dialed.

A voice, so gravelly and deep that it seemed to lie at the outer edge of the human auditory range, rasped, “Hello.” I introduced myself. There was a short pause, as if Vonnegut were fixing his gaze on me from the other end of the line, then he spoke.

So many people watch porn online that the industry’s carbon footprint might be worse now that it was in the days of DVDs and magazines.

Online streaming is a win for the environment. Streaming music eliminates all that physical material—CDs, jewel cases, cellophane, shipping boxes, fuel—and can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 40 percent or more. Video streaming is still being studied, but the carbon footprint should similarly be much lower than that of DVDs.

Scientists who analyze the environmental impact of the internet tout the benefits of this “dematerialization,” observing that energy use and carbon-dioxide emissions will drop as media increasingly can be delivered over the internet. But this theory might have a major exception: porn.

Since the turn of the century, the pornography industry has experienced two intense hikes in popularity. In the early 2000s, broadband enabled higher download speeds. Then, in 2008, the advent of so-called tube sites allowed users to watch clips for free, like people watch videos on YouTube. Adam Grayson, the chief financial officer of the adult company Evil Angel, calls the latter hike “the great mushroom-cloud porn explosion of 2008.”

In The Emotional Life of the Toddler, the child-psychology and psychotherapy expert Alicia F. Lieberman details the dramatic triumphs and tribulations of kids ages 1 to 3. Some of her anecdotes make the most commonplace of experiences feel like they should be backed by a cinematic instrumental track. Take Lieberman’s example of what a toddler feels while walking across the living room:

When Johnny can walk from one end of the living room to the other without falling even once, he feels invincible. When his older brother intercepts him and pushes him to the floor, he feels he has collapsed in shame and wants to bite his attacker (if only he could catch up with him!) When Johnny’s father rescues him, scolds the brother, and helps Johnny on his way, hope and triumph rise up again in Johnny’s heart; everything he wants seems within reach. When the exhaustion overwhelms him a few minutes later, he worries that he will never again be able to go that far and bursts into tears.

In analyzing Doug Jones’s surprise win, the pundit-in-chief misconstrues the race and elides his own role in Moore’s defeat.

Doug Jones’s victory in the U.S. Senate race in Alabama on Tuesday poses a quandary to Republicans at all levels—but to none more than President Trump. The results of the race demonstrate the limitations of both his political power and of his self-appointed role as pundit-in-chief. He is more interested in being right than in winning—but on Tuesday, he did neither.

The president offered a series of somewhat contradictory responses to the race between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. Late Tuesday, he tweeted:

Congratulations to Doug Jones on a hard fought victory. The write-in votes played a very big factor, but a win is a win. The people of Alabama are great, and the Republicans will have another shot at this seat in a very short period of time. It never ends!

Will the vice president—and the religious right—be rewarded for their embrace of Donald Trump?

No man can serve two masters, the Bible teaches, but Mike Pence is giving it his all. It’s a sweltering September afternoon in Anderson, Indiana, and the vice president has returned to his home state to deliver the Good News of the Republicans’ recently unveiled tax plan. The visit is a big deal for Anderson, a fading manufacturing hub about 20 miles outside Muncie that hasn’t hosted a sitting president or vice president in 65 years—a fact noted by several warm-up speakers. To mark this historic civic occasion, the cavernous factory where the event is being held has been transformed. Idle machinery has been shoved to the perimeter to make room for risers and cameras and a gargantuan American flag, which—along with bleachers full of constituents carefully selected for their ethnic diversity and ability to stay awake during speeches about tax policy—will serve as the TV-ready backdrop for Pence’s remarks.